Best practices for managing automation flows

15 min
Advanced

By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:

  • Administer automation flows
  • Use best practices when writing and managing automation flows
  • Troubleshoot automation

Manage automation flows

To simplify your experience when creating and managing your automation flows, follow some best practices.
👇Click the boxes below to learn more about each best practice.

Troubleshoot automation flows

There are some useful questions to ask yourself depending on how your automation flow is behaving.
👇Click the boxes below to explore what you can investigate in different situations.

Let’s explore an example

Tara created a new flow, but it has some problems. She wants her flow to assign work items to the user that transitions them to In Progress and set the fix version. If there aren’t any sub-tasks, she wants to send an email reminding the Reporter to add them. If there are sub-tasks, she wants the flow to edit their due dates.
👇This is how the flow is currently configured.
A screenshot of an automation flow in Jira showing a work itemm transitioned trigger that executes for work items transitioned from To Do to In Progress. The next component is an assign work item action that assigns the work item to the user who triggered the event. Then, there’s another action that edits the Fix versions field. Next is a related work item condition that ensures subtasks are not present. The next component is a send email action that sends the initiator an email that says: {{issue.key}} needs subtasks.” Then, there’s another related work items condition that ensures subtasks are present. Following this condition, there’s a separate related work items branch for subtasks that has an action. The action edits the Due date field.
Let’s troubleshoot this flow.
👇Click the boxes below to explore each step in troubleshooting this flow.
Once Tara goes through each of these steps, testing after each change, the flow successfully executes!
👇Here’s the correct configuration of Tara’s automation flow.
A screenshot of an automation flow in Jira showing a work item transitioned trigger that executes for all work items transitioned to In Progress. The next component is an assign work item action that assigns the trigger work item to the user who triggered the event. Then, there’s another action that edits the Fix versions field. Next is an IF, ELSE block. The IF block has a related work items condition that ensures subtasks are not present and a send email action that sends the reporter an email that says: {{issue.key}} needs subtasks.” The ELSE block has a related work items branch for subtasks that has an edit work items fields action that edits the Due date field.

Follow these best practices to optimize your automation flows, so that they run more smoothly.

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next lesson

Create Jira automation flows for developer productivity

  • Auto-assign work based on your team’s capacity
  • Automatically create sub-tasks
  • Automatically trigger actions in Jira from integrations
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